[267] At Vienna, in the Museum for Art and Industry, there is a small collection of glass from Hebron. Besides the bangles of opaque glass which belong to the old primitive family, there are some small vessels of a deep amber-coloured glass similar to that brought from Rhodes, and finally a few vases of Persian type of a bluish-green metal; among the last group may be found some lamps with glass tubes similar to those mentioned in the text.
[268] The miscellaneous beads, found chiefly in the neighbourhood of Benares and Cawnpore, are associated for the most part with Buddhist remains of the time of the Gupta dynasty, which reigned in Northern India shortly before our era, but very few of these beads are of glass. Of great interest are the spindle-shaped beads, decorated with intersecting lines of enamel—black, grey, or white—on a ground of quartz, or sometimes of carnelian. A series of these beads may be seen in the ‘Gallery of Religions’ in the British Museum. They are described by Mrs. J. R. Rivett-Carnac in the Journal of Indian Art, vol. ix.
[269] At the Indian Exhibition held at Earl’s Court a few years ago, some of these Indian glass-makers were at work in a little hut, and here the native processes could be watched.
[270] Through the kindness of Mr. Forrest, ex-Director of Records at the India Office, I have been enabled to examine a collection of small glass vessels obtained by him in the Kaira district of Guzerat. Among them I noticed some graceful little cruet-shaped ewers of a pale pinkish glass—the colour apparently obtained from gold—and also some glass lamps of rounded conical form similar to those used in Cairo.
[271] My chief authorities for the early history of Chinese glass are the works of Dr. Hirth, especially a paper on the subject in his Chinesische Studien, and some casual remarks in Dr. Bushell’s Oriental Ceramic Art. [I have at the last moment been able to add a few notes to what I have written, based on the chapter on glass in Dr. Bushell’s Chinese Art. June 1906.]
[272] Thus we have the statements of the missionaries Ricci and Du Halde, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, that the Chinese made glass. As far back as the twelfth century, the Arab writer Edrisi speaks of glass-workers in the Chinese town of Djan-ku, wherever that may be.
[273] Dr. Bushell, however, thinks that there is evidence that in the fifth century glass of Indo-Scythian origin reached Northern China by way of the great trade route through Chinese Turkestan. About the same time it was brought from the West, by the sea route, to the southern capital (the modern Nanking). The manufacture was at that time established in both North and South China, and ‘has been carried on with indifferent success ever since’ (Chinese Art, vol. ii. pp. 60-61).
[274] The very absence of native enamelled glass might indeed be used as an argument against the otherwise plausible theory that it was from the Saracenic glass that the Chinese first learned how to enamel their porcelain with fusible colours over the glaze. See on this point my book on Porcelain in this series, p. 87. Dr. Bushell mentions ‘the recent discovery in mosques of the western provinces of China of a number of hanging lamps of characteristic shape, enamelled in colours,’ with Arabic motives and script. Some of these have been taken to America. Chinese Art, vol. ii. p. 69.
[275] Hu succeeded in splitting up the character with which his simple name was written into the two ideographs Ku and Yueh, and thereupon adopted the more imposing title ‘Chamber of the Ancient Moon.’
[276] This collection is described in the Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, vol. xx., in an article on Chinese glass by Herr A. Bapst.